The aim of this chapter is to assess what, if anything, administrative law can demonstrate about multi-level administration in the European Union and the United States. The particular focus of the examination is not on the content of administrative law in each legal order, but rather on the impact of EU and US federal administrative law on the Member States and US States respectively. It will be seen that, while US federal administrative law has primarily only influential effect on US States, EU administrative law is often binding on Member States. This observation challenges presumptions often made, particularly in political science, as to the degrees of inter-penetration in administration in the EU and the US. It will be argued that the cause of divergence is largely derived from differing judicial attitudes as to the fundamental tenets of the co-operation between the different levels of administration, and indeed, more general understandings of federalism in the two jurisdictions. In this way, this study also provides a useful prism through which to consider integration in the EU and US more broadly.

The binding legal force that the Charter acquired with the Treaty of Lisbon has led some national constitutional courts to adopt an entirely new approach to EU fundamental rights. Most notably, the Austrian Constitutional Court, the Italian Constitutional Court, and the German Federal Constitutional Court have explicitly made the Charter a yardstick of constitutional review. This article compares and contrasts the approaches of these three courts to the Charter. It shows that the strategies of the Austrian and German Constitutional Courts have many characteristics in common, including that national constitutional rights are treated as a primary source and the Charter as a mere secondary benchmark in the majority of cases. The most distinctive feature of the Italian Constitutional Court's strategy is that it mainly aims to prevent ordinary courts from circumventing constitutionality refences by directly applying the Charter. The article concludes by arguing that it has many advantages when national constitutional courts adopt the Charter as a yardstick of constitutional review. It is for the constitutional courts and the CJEU to ensure that these benefits are not outweighed by some serious drawbacks of constitutional review in light of the Charter.

This chapter reviews the regulatory innovation process in the European Union, with a focus on the environmental sector. It examines the EU documents on regulation and, in particular, the ‘eight pillars of European governance’ listed by the European Commission in its follow-up to the 2001 White Paper on European Governance, as a useful means of categorising the practical consequences which the European Union attaches to the different implications of the governance debate in the EU. It goes on to summarise the initiatives on regulatory innovation as kick-started by the White Paper on Governance, and to map the current state of each of these initiatives. It concludes that no fundamental reform is required, but rather only a slim number of targeted remedies; the only real solution to the regulatory fog is acceptance and deregulation.

The discussion of the need to establish a ‘right to the internet’, ongoing now for over thirty years, has not brought about a clear resolution. Despite the growing importance of online services to both the economy and social life, there is no consensus on the limits of such a right, nor on the need to define it at all—not to mention controversy over its inclusion in the catalogue of fundamental rights.

However, the discussion about the right to internet access in the context of the EU legal system now seems obsolete. This is so, because—not through the direct modernisation of the Charter of Fundamental Rights but as part of new telecommunications legislation—a new subjective right, called the right to open internet, has emerged.

The aim of this Article is to clarify the content of this right and its relationship to the principle of network neutrality. Against this background, recent judgments of the Court of Justice will be examined and discussed. Although closely related to the telecommunications market, these judgments may serve as a starting point for further discussion on the meaning of the right to open internet in the EU legal system, including its relation to the protection of human rights.

The right to work was until recently under-explored in academic literature and judicial decision-making. Classified often as a social right, it was viewed as a non-justiciable entitlement. Today, as the right to work is sometimes used as a slogan in favour of deregulation of the labour market, as well as a slogan against immigration and unionisation, the analysis of the right to work as part of a labour law agenda is crucial. Against this background, this chapter examines the right to work in the European Convention on Human Rights. Even though the right to work is not explicitly protected in the ECHR, the chapter identifies in the case law of the European Court of Human Rights certain principles that underpin the right to work, which can serve as guidance in the interpretation of existing provisions of the Convention.

What you find inspiring depends to a degree on where you come from and what you are looking for. So, by applying the principle of transparency, let me put my cards on the table. Those who founded the European Communities, and indeed both Jack Mackenzie Stuart and I, went through the last World War. I imagine that I will be the last judge of the Court in Luxembourg of whom this can be said. If you have been through such an experience, it is something which marks your whole life.

Anyone familiar with French legal education will know that what a common lawyer would call the contents page to be found at the beginning (often in summary form) or at the end (often in detail) of a French textbook or monograph on law is more than a mere guide for browsers and readers. It forms le plan, that is to say the epistemological framework the intellectual importance of which is equal to the substance of the work. It is what endows the book with its scientific credibility and any thesis or textbook lacking a coherent cartesian plan will by definition lack intellectual credibility. But what of the other guide provided in many academic books, namely the index? Is this guide nothing but a guide, never to be allowed to aspire to an epistemological status like that accorded to le plan? Or is an index, with its strictly alphabetical ordering, capable of having an epistemological role?

In parallel with American constitutional thought, there exists a doctrine of incorporation in the European legal order. European fundamental rights will thus not exclusively limit the European institutions. They may—in certain situations—equally apply to the public authorities of the Member States. This chapter looks at the incorporation doctrine across the three sources of European fundamental rights. With three distinct sources of fundamental rights, the constitutional principles governing the European incorporation doctrine are unsurprisingly more complex than the American incorporation doctrine. What are the similarities and dissimilarities between the European and the American incorporation doctrine? The Union presently favours selective over total incorporation. In this respect, it emulates the American constitutional order. Yet the European doctrine nonetheless differs strikingly from the classic American doctrine. For unlike the latter, the European legal order has not made incorporation dependent on the type of fundamental right at issue. The European doctrine has, by contrast, made the incorporation of Union fundamental rights into national legal orders dependent on the type of Member State action.

This chapter explores the ambiguous allocation of authority in the governance of two areas of environmental protection: industrial pollution and genetically modified organisms. Ambiguity, that is, a difficulty in asserting that any single actor has the final word on a subject, is inevitable in the EU’s multi-level governance system and is not necessarily undesirable. These two examples demonstrate that even in the face of concerted efforts to introduce a formal hierarchy, the need for collaboration around softer norms persists.

The purpose of this chapter is to explore selected aspects of the relationship between the general principles of EU law and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. The chapter first looks at the expansion of fundamental rights in EU law and the importance of general principles by reference to three principles which have provided fruitful grounds for judicial activism: the right to judicial protection, the principle of non-discrimination, and the right to personal data. It then examines the sources of fundamental rights under Article 6 TEU and the relationship between Charter rights and general principles. Finally, it explores a pivotal issue in EU constitutional discourse, namely, the scope of application of the Charter and the general principles of law. The chapter concludes by observing that, far from declining in importance, the general principles of law continue to be an integral part of judicial methodology; that, following the introduction of the Charter, the CJEU applies a heightened level of judicial scrutiny; and that it favours a centralised approach opting for an autonomous interpretation of the Charter, granting it precedence over national constitutional norms, and understanding broadly its scope of application.

This chapter examines the relationship between the methods that the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) use to decide disputes that involve ‘human’ or ‘fundamental’ rights claims, and the substantive outcomes that result from the use of these particular methods. It has a limited aim: in attempting to understand the interrelationship between human rights methodology and human rights outcomes, it considers primarily the use of ‘comparative reasoning’ in ‘human’ and ‘fundamental’ rights claims by these courts. It is not primarily concerned with examining the extent to which the use of comparative reasoning is based on an appropriate methodology or whether there is a persuasive normative theory underpinning the use of comparative reasoning. The issues considered in this chapter do some of the groundwork, however, that is necessary in order to address these methodological and normative questions.

The process of European legal integration has long been understood to engage the workings of domestic legal orders, EC law and, to a lesser extent, the law of the ECHR. In general terms, the relationship between these bodies of law has been characterised as involving the direct and indirect interchange of principle and practice across jurisdictions. An example of direct interchange is found in the EC law requirement that national courts give effect to rules emanating from the EC legal order in all cases raising EC law issues. The indirect form occurs in disputes which do not raise EC law issues but which see national courts voluntarily borrow from their experience within the EC legal order by way of developing the domestic legal system. Likewise, national courts and the European Court of Justice have relied upon the law of the ECHR, a “foreign” body of rules, in developing their respective legal orders.

The title of this paper embraces three concepts which will be used as paths to reach a destination. The destination is Italy, taken as an example of an active promoter of European integration, even when facing difficulties in complying with its obligations under the EC Treaty.

The first path leads towards judicial intervention, seen as a major tool for making changes within a national legal system. Some examples (section III) concern the scrutiny that the ECJ operates, when prompted by the Commission, acting under Article 88(2) EC. Other examples (sections IV and V) are related to the open dialogue national judges engage in with the ECJ, when they start preliminary references under Article 234 EC.